Steven, you are confusing the situation by using actual measurement data.
The only thing that matters to the warmistas is computer generated climate model projections. These virtual reality models have proved themselves many times, accurately predicting future truth and hind-casting the past, that now they are the gold standard that actual measurements have to live up to.

This is a discussion I had on the weekend with a group of astrophysicists. I would appreciate your comments: Bryan Gaensler
Yesterday at 04:31 via Twitter •
• A view of Australia in 2100. Read it — and weep. http://t.co/UvnaE2ue via @smh

Six degrees of devastation
smh.com.au
IT’S 2100. A sci-fi movie version of the future is finally here – flying cars, robots, choking pollution. Oh, and the planet is 5 degrees hotter than it was at the turn of millennium. It’s nearly 90 years since scientists warned (again) that the planet could warm by between 4 and 6 degrees if we did…
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John Rombi It’s a pity that Ben Cubby never shows the opposing view to AGW. It’s unfortunately, always a very one sided argument.
Yesterday at 07:10 • Like
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Michael Brown What opposing view to AGW? You can argue about what temperature rise may end up being (3C, 4C, 5C, 6C) but you have to overturn a lot of science for AGW not to happen. Of course, for the opposing view there is always The Australian.
23 hours ago • Like
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John Rombi Michael, I can give you a list as long as my arm of scientists that oppose the science of AGW. Or just further investigation of your own will show that the science is not settled.
23 hours ago • Like
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Michael Brown I have looked at this stuff already in quite some detail. The stuff opposing AGW full stop (~0C) is largely in the realm of pseudo-science. I even wrote a parody model which correlated global temperature with Man U FA Cup final appearences, which has many of the features of “sceptic” climate models (http://theconversation.edu.au/how-david-beckham-caused-global-warming-the-man-u-climate-model-4548). As for lists of scientists, these ain’t hard to compile given how many scientists there are worldwide – even if it is a fringe view, 100 signatures isn’t too hard to compile.
22 hours ago • Like • 1
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John Rombi Michael, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with quite a few of these “sceptical scientists” and whilst I’m not an expert on Climate change, I have ( for my own education) extensively researched all the available information..I have taken in the evidence from both sides, and I can certainly see why the opposing view is very strong.
22 hours ago • Like
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Michael Brown Who? Bob Carter? Ian Plimer? Stewart Franks? All regularly make major errors about the relevant science.
22 hours ago • Like
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John Rombi This is where the public become conflicted….One side says, one thing…then the opposing side counters and claims that their opponents are wrong….Yes I have spoken to these scientists and many others…What makes their evidence any better/worse than the opposition?…You’ve mentioned that “they” have made major errors in their research. BUT this is exactly what they have accused the “other side” of carrying out. Whilst I have my own thoughts on this…How does “Joe Blow” in the suburbs decide what to believe and not believe..If prominent scientists from both sides cannot agree…Unfortunately a lot of politics, social agenda & change + money, power and prestige are rolled into the “caravan of AGW”…What I’m seeing at the moment, is the same evidence being interpreted in two ways….It’s like the glass half filled with water…One group will tell you it’s half full and the other side will tell you it’s half empty. Both are right, for different reasons.
22 hours ago • Like
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Brendon Brewer Calling it “AGW” raises a pretty big red flag.
21 hours ago • Like • 1
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Michael Brown There are a couple of things one can look for as a non-expert. For example, the fraction of science papers concluding AGW isn’t real is tiny (http://www.jamespowell.org/index.html). To assume it is a 50/50 debate is false balance. Those who are denying the science often rely of just a fraction of the available data, because their conclusions wouldn’t hold if they used all the data. For example, Carter & co plotted sea level rise in Quadrant Online using the data from just one satellite (the one with the worst errors) rather than all available satellites, and only plotted 7-years of data when 20-years is available (look up satellite sea level). That is pseudo-science. That is why it appeared in Quadrant rather than any peer reviewed science journal.
21 hours ago • Like • 2
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John Rombi If I was to make this post available to the “other” side, I’m sure they would return with answers to show how the evidence you have presented is wrong or distorted….I’m sure you can see how the poplulace becomes sceptical.
21 hours ago • Like
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Eric Korpela Yes, John, anyone can get on TV and claim anyone else is wrong without providing valid evidence. That’s why we don’t fight scientific battles on TV. In global warming, the battles over whether it’s occurring and whether it’s anthropogenic are long over. Michael is right. You’d have to overturn a century of scientific understanding to find a way for it not to happen.

The ongoing questions are how bad will it be, is still being discussed, but no significant number of scientists are claiming it won’t be a significant impact on human beings.
20 hours ago • Edited • Like
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Emil Lenc John, I’m sure the “other” side will always have something to say (this is why they resort to blogs and media channels) – have you ever tried to use reasoning to explain to an astrologer why they are wrong? You’ll never hear the end of it! I think much of the public confusion is as a result of the media making it seem like there is an argument when in reality the argument was done and dusted decades ago (although local politicians have not helped much to clear the confusion here either). In a mistaken effort to appear unbiased, the media give deniers equal weighting (or worse, as with some disreputable channels, give them higher or even total weighting). As a result, the general public may believe that deniers arguments have some scientific merit and backing. However, most of the general public would not see through the cracks in these arguments. Instead, they are easily swayed by the reassuring “it’ll be right” mentality … only to be reinforced with all sorts of unusual conspiracies introduced to explain how governments are using global warming as an excuse to extract more tax from “working families”, etc., etc. I won’t claim to understand all of the science in detail but I trust the scientific method and as Michael pointed out there is very little in the way of peer-reviewed papers with arguments against global warming (even worse, the few that are published have very poor citation rates – as it stands, I personally have three times as many citations as all of these papers combined and in a third of the time … and I’m just your Joe-average scientist!). Anyway, I find it quite frustrating that we are still at this point rather than moving on and concentrating on solutions to this very serious threat to our Earth and humanity. With a bit of foresight we could open up many new scientific, engineering, business and economic opportunities that aren’t so heavily reliant on fossil fuels but few people have a long-term focus – it’s always about “me and now” for the majority of the population
19 hours ago • Like • 5
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John Rombi I’ve had good discussions with http://www.drroyspencer.com/ and I would be happy to hear the take on his evidence against AGW from the above posters. I encourage you to make a (sensible) comment, please. I will then take your comments to him. I’m here to learn as much as I can.

Roy Spencer, Ph. D.http://www.drroyspencer.com
Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for October, 2012 is +0.33 deg. C (click for large version):
17 hours ago • Like • Remove Preview
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Emil Lenc As I’ve already stated, I not a climate scientist but if he believes that he is one then I have three important words of advice for him : “Publish or perish”. He can blow his own trumpet as much as he likes but unless his theories make substantial predictions and are tested by his peers they are just opinions and deemed worthless. On the face of it there are two things that immediately ring alarm bells with this guy – first he feels the need to advertise himself as a former NASA scientist as if that should add credibility to whatever he is saying and secondly he is a proponent of intelligent design! Please, really?
16 hours ago via mobile • Like • 2
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John Rombi I would appreciate your point of view here, a robust debate is good for everyone. https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Galileo-Movement/101728306584541

The Galileo Movement
We are keen to see all sides of the human-made climate change debate aired to enable people to decide for themselves.
Page: 2,691 like this.
14 hours ago • Like • Remove Preview
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Michael Brown Roy Spencer believes the relationship between increasing CO2 and temperature has been overestimated by most scientists and that much of the recent warming could be natural. However, Spencer’s last paper was significantly flawed (including selective use of data) as discussed by Dessler and the flaws in the peer review of Spencer’s paper led to the resignation of editor of Remote Sensing (the relevant journal). This is discussed at http://www.skepticalscience.com/Dessler-2011-Debunks-Roy-Spencer-And-Richard-Lindzen.html which linkes to relevant resources.
9 hours ago • Like
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Michael Brown The Galileo Movement is one of several pseudo-science organisations that invokes the name/memory of a great scientist. One member claims to have overturned a century of physics with a fish box on a Sunday afternoon (http://www.readfearn.com/2012/07/greenhouse-gas-theory-disproved-with-two-fish-boxes-and-a-roll-of-cling-film/). A spokesman for the Galileo Movement said climate change science had been captured by “some of the major banking families in the world” who form a “tight-knit cabal” (see http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/happy_to_help_those_who_ask_but_not_people_who_peddle_this/P20/). The Galileo Movement isn’t about robust debate, it is about pseudo-science and conspiracy theories.
9 hours ago • Like
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Bryan Gaensler Love that last link, Michael! When even Andrew Bolt thinks you’re a nutter, it’s time to re-evaluate your position …
9 hours ago via mobile • Like • 1
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Bryan Gaensler John: I’m not an expert in this area, but I’m curious to know where the “money and power” supporting global warming are supposedly coming from. If you look at a list of the richest and most powerful companies in the world and what drives their core business, Occam’s Razor suggests that the money and power are probably mostly going into refuting climate change (or at least convincing us all that we shouldn’t do anything about it). This hypothesis would be consistent with the puzzling situation that the scientific literature has a strong consensus, but yet the public opinion is that this is a controversial issue. As a scientist, I’m a fan of simple hypotheses that explain the available data.
9 hours ago via mobile • Like
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Bryan Gaensler Michael: How many trolls did your Man United article produce?
8 hours ago • Like
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John Rombi Whilst I have the greatest of respect for you Bryan and the other scientists here……but as I’ve read on all the posts here, this group is right (about AGW) and the rest of the scientists that follow the AGW line are wrong. Now, what makes this group and it’s evidence right, and all the others wrong?..They have worked hard in their fields of expertise, yet are discounted as scientists with ethical reasoning and data…Money & power?…I am playing the devils advocate here, so please indulge me..scientists are human like everyone else. The position does not isolate you from all the human traits..I wonder how many scientists and organisations are going to go against AGW, when it’s the politicians that hold the purse strings?..How many scientists continue to be taken seriously and funded by tax payers money when they rock the boat, especially on this important topic of AGW..
8 hours ago • Like
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Bryan Gaensler John: The bottom line is that unless one is an expert working in the field and can develop an informed opinion of one’s own, one *has* to trust peer review. If you go against that, then everything is on the table – vaccinations are a form of government mind control, the Earth is 6000 years old, the Zionists control the world economy, etc etc. If you take medicine, use a mobile phone or fly in planes, then you’ve got to wear the other side of the argument – the same scientific method that sits behind these things that you accept unquestioningly is also what has led us to the overwhelming evidence for AGW.

You can argue that peer review is flawed and that nobody will publish controversial articles because they don’t want to rock the boat, but that’s not how science works. Every scientist would give their right arm to publish the “gotcha” paper that garners thousands of citations and that overturns a century of understanding. We all want to rock the boat!

And indeed there are many examples of single papers, often rejected the first time around or published in obscure journals, which have immediately turned a particular scientific field upside down. In astronomy, seminal papers by Shapley (the Sun is on the edge of the Galaxy) and Hubble (the Universe is expanding) come to mind.

Or to pick a more modern example, do you really think Brian P. Schmidt and his team debated against publishing their Accelerating Universe result because they feared losing their funding? They did debate about it, but only because they wanted to be sure their measurements and conclusions were robust before going public with their result. Similarly, if the case against AGW is reasonable, then how come no respected experts in the field (as opposed to retired scientists who work in unrelated areas) have drawn this conclusion from the reams of publicly available data? Surely there must be some senior, established, scientist out there who has no fear of a backlash or loss of funding if they write one controversial paper? All we would need would be just *one* convincing, well argued, paper disproving AGW and everything would change.
8 hours ago • Like
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John Rombi Bryan, I find this comment rather insulting ” these things that you accept unquestioningly”…I have questioned both sides, and I listen to both sides..I get rather annoyed when a scientist like Tim Flannery is used to terrify the populace, I’m sure you have read his crystal balling over the last six years…All the major city dams would be empty, and no significant rains would ever fall again, and if it did it would evaporate on contact with the ground. After all his bluster, how wrong was he? and he is the gov’t’s Chief Climate Scientist, even though he does not hold a degree in this field.
8 hours ago • Like
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Bryan Gaensler John: I absolutely did not mean to be insulting and have nothing but respect for you. I personally put Tim Flannery almost in the same basket as Ian Plimer, for the reasons you argue (see also Matthew Bailes’ article earlier this week on “science politicians” – http://theconversation.edu.au/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-science-politician-10849). I remember in 2005 just having accepted a job to move back to Sydney from the USA, and reading Flannery’s article saying that in a few more years people in Sydney wouldn’t be able to flush their toilets anymore, and thinking “OMG – what have I just walked into!”. But at an international level, I don’t think the IPCC pays too much attention to Tim Flannery. Feel free to tune him out and the story doesn’t change.

I’m always very cautious of the argument that one should question both sides and listen to both sides. Both sides have to past the smell test before one moves to the step of spending time questioning and listening. If I questioned and listened to every alternate cosmology theory that I get in the mail, I would never get anything else done …

The Conversation
theconversation.e
5 December 2012, 8.16pm AESTThe rise and rise of the science politicianGeorge L
aoutarisIn our naive youth, we imagine scientific careers that are exceedingly pure.In them, all that matters is the quality of our ideas, evidence and insight, written up in concise documents and published in refereed jo…
8 hours ago • Edited • Like
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Bryan Gaensler By the way, I have a privileged perspective on this because I am the Editor-in-Chief of a peer-reviewed journal, PASA. I’m one of those ‘gatekeepers’ that decide whether to only hold to the mainstream view or to publish radical, alternative, ideas. I receive a huge number of papers covering the latter (about a third of all the submissions to the journal), and immediately reject almost all of them. The reason for rejection is not because the papers are trying to rock the boat, but because the articles do not draw upon previous work, do not explain their assumptions or arguments, and generally are incomprehensible to anyone except the author.

If I do receive a paper on an alternate or unorthodox theory (usually that the Universe is not expanding or that General Relativity is wrong etc.), and if it is well written and makes a clear case, then I will send it out for peer review. If the referee recommends rejection, then the case has to be made by the referee that the paper is flawed in specific ways, not just that the idea is crazy or goes against conventional understanding.

Only a small fraction of these alternative papers make it to peer review, and almost all of these end up getting rejected based on the referee’s comments. However, a small fraction make it through. A nice example is the paper “Quantization of Planetary Systems and its Dependency on Stellar Rotation” by Zhogbi, which we published in 2011 (see http://www.publish.csiro.au/?paper=AS09062). The author proposes a pretty whacky idea, and it took him 18 months and multiple iterations before he got through the peer review process. But his paper, although very probably wrong, did meet all the criteria for a new addition to the scientific literature, so we published it. In the year since publication, the paper has been read 112 times but is yet to be cited by anybody.

So at least in one case, I hope I’ve convinced you that there is no conservative establishment or faceless panel who work behind the scenes to maintain the status quo. If a paper is well written and well argued, it will be considered on its merits. It’s therefore puzzling that the climate change denial movement has only been able to produce 24 papers in 12 years that have been able to pass this rather uncontroversial minimum standard for publication. If papers on quantised orbits can get a hearing, you’d think there would be entire journals full of heavily cited papers presenting both sides of the great climate change debate.

CSIRO PUBLISHING – PASAhttp://www.publish.csiro.au
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) is an international
journal for new and significant research in astronomy and astrophysics, focusing on southern hemisphere astronomy
7 hours ago • Edited • Like
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Bryan Gaensler … and one last comment in this vein before calling it a night.

If you want to point to economic forces and their tendency to enforce the mainstream opinion, put yourself in the shoes of a typical journal and its editorial board. Most journals have a low to modest impact factor, a small and dwindling subscription base, and pressure from their publisher to come up with attention-getting content to boost interest and increase readership. The journal which I edit, PASA, is pretty standard in facing such pressures.

Given such an environment, and given the huge number of journals dealing with climate research and related areas, you’d think every editor out there would be desperate to stoke the fires of controversy, and to get some good papers that present both sides of the issue. Certainly on issues of genuine controversy in astronomy (e.g. the missing satellite problem, cold dark matter vs warm dark matter, how many flavours of neutrino are there), PASA is doing exactly that, soliciting well argued papers that present both sides of the argument with the intent of boosting our readership and number of subscribers, as well as building the reputation of the journal.

However, this simply isn’t happening on global warming. You can’t blame money or power behind the scenes, because every journal and every publisher would love to buck the trend and blow this issue wide open. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that such papers simply aren’t being written, which in turn argues that there’s no scientific case for it. It’s the same reason there aren’t peer-reviewed papers published on unicorns or the Tooth Fairy. I’d love to run the journal that published the paper definitely proving that the Tooth Fairy is real! If I thought such papers were out there to be written, I’d be finding the relevant authors and begging them to submit something. But so far, no takers …

PS There is at least one recent paper out there arguing *against* the Tooth Fairy – see http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0492 . Sadly, it was never submitted for peer review.

[1204.0492] Non-detection of the Tooth Fairy at Optical Wavelengths
arxiv.org
7 hours ago • Edited • Like
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Michael Brown Bryan, the Man U article did generate lots of trolling, as do many climate articles for The Conversation. Normally you can dismiss the trolls, but a large number of them write op-ed for The Australian, ABC’s The Drum and Quadrant. This includes John ’56 McLean, Marc Hendrickx, Anthony Cox and Tim Curtin.
37 minutes ago • Like
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John Rombi Bryan, Gentlemen, Thank you for your robust comments.
27 minutes ago • Like
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Six degrees of devastationhttp://www.smh.com.au
IT’S 2100. A sci-fi movie version of the future is finally here – flying cars, robots, choking pollution. Oh, and the planet is 5 degrees hotter than it was at the turn

With that sort of money you could eliminate diarrea and malarial deaths in the third-world among children. Millions of children die each year from those diseases. I wonder where that issue is on Climate Progress’ list of priorities.

And if Willie McDouchebag had the means to do his homework before he got his pet peeve malarial drool and Bla Bla Bla he wouldn’t be painting himself as the poster boy as the nutcase he is right now. But ya know he did have those means and look at him? He got lots of sucker followers who don’t know any difference……

@Will – frightening, but true. I wonder what the world would look like if all the money thrown down into the climate “rat hole” was used to provide many african countries with medicine for tuberculosis, malaria, etc.

I have lived in the Tropics since 2008 (9.35 N Latitude) In 2008-9-10, I never pulled a sheet over me. In 2011, I covered myself several times. This year, I pull the sheet over me about 1/3rd of the time, maybe more. Totally unscientific, but it has been cooler the last two years..

I’ve been there, but I didn’t do it that partciular site and I was more civilised with Me comments and all I got was BS back, so I don’t know. Live and learn I guess. You’ll see, It is your’s to experience.

“All microwave sounding instruments were developed for day to day operational use in weather forecasting and thus are typically not calibrated to the precision needed for climate studies. A climate quality dataset can be extracted from their measurements only by careful intercalibration of the data from the MSU, AMSU and ATMS instruments.’